Retention Edge E35: Is Your Brand AI-Ready?

If you're not thinking about how AI is changing the way people find and buy products, you're already behind.

I’m guessing that’s not a problem, though.

AI, LLM SEO and all the other fun acronyms and buzzwords are everywhere. But these concepts are still very poorly understood.

This week I sat down with Lauren Livak Gilbert, who leads the Digital Shelf Institute, a community of over 10,000 commerce leaders across brands and retailers. She also hosts Unpacking the Digital Shelf, and she's spent the last year deep in conversations with brands trying to figure out what AI actually means for their business.

We had a deep discussion into agentic commerce, the new “digital shelf”, and what you need to do to win in the age of AI.

Here are some of the top takeaways from the episode.

The digital shelf just got a lot smaller

Here's a number that should make every brand operator uncomfortable: when someone searches for a product on ChatGPT, they see eight options.

Eight. Not hundreds. Not thousands. Eight.

On Amazon, you'd get hundreds of thousands of results for something like "gluten free travel snacks." On the digital shelf, maybe 100,000. An infinite scroll of possibilities.

On an LLM? You need to be one of eight.

Lauren put it bluntly: the consideration set is shrinking dramatically. And Google is moving in the same direction with AI summaries at the top of search results. Even if your customer never opens ChatGPT, they're already getting AI-curated answers.

This isn't coming. It's here.

Be found, be relevant, be talked about

Lauren breaks AEO (answer engine optimization) into three buckets, and it's the clearest framework I've heard on this.

1. Be found. Make sure your site is crawlable. Use HTML, not JavaScript. Don't block LLM crawlers. This is the bare minimum and a surprising number of brands are failing at it.

2. Be relevant. Answer the questions your customers are actually asking, in the language they use. Not your internal marketing language. If people search "gluten free" and your content says "wheat free," you might not show up. LLMs aren't always great at inference.

3. Be talked about. LLMs use citations as a signal of authority. The more your brand is mentioned across the web, the more likely you are to surface in AI answers. This is where PR and corporate comms become a direct lever for product discovery.

The good news? It’s not a massive overhaul. Your job is to keep doing the fundamentals, and doing some slight tweaks to make your content more machine readable.

The bad news? If you haven't started, your competitors probably have.

True agentic commerce is far away

There's a lot of hype around AI agents buying products on your behalf. Websites are becoming obsolete, you’re not selling to humans anymore, et cetera et cetera.

But that’s one of the things about the AI hype wave that causes so much confusion. There are many different levels to it.

People may already be searching in LLMs for things to buy, but “true” agentic commerce - people using agents to buy - is still a long way off.

ChatGPT already pulled back from instant checkout. Turns out, building a commerce engine is really hard. Companies like Shopify have spent years figuring it out, and OpenAI realized they can't just bolt it on.

The bigger barrier is trust. Most people are still doing research in an LLM and then going to the retailer they already know to buy. They want to use their loyalty program. They want to pick the seller.

The practical takeaway: stop worrying about agents buying things and start worrying about agents recommending things. That's the shift that's already happening.

AI is a threat if you refuse to see it as an opportunity

Lauren was on a debate panel at Shop Talk on this exact question. Her answer was perfect: "It's a threat if you don't accept it as an opportunity."

She shared a story that stuck with me.

Someone came up to her after the panel and said people at their company were boycotting AI because they didn't want to lose their jobs. Lauren's response: they're going to lose their jobs anyway because they can't keep up with someone who is using it.

I feel this in our world too. The developers and teams who've embraced these tools in the last few months are operating at a completely different level. It's not just about speed. It's about the kind of work you can take on. Data analysis, system integrations, reports that give you visibility you never had before.

But Lauren made an important point: you still have to know the fundamentals. She mentioned an article about Claude going down and developers not knowing what to do. The tool is a superpower, but it's not a substitute for understanding the work.

Large organizations don't change overnight. Start now. Upskill your team. Test and learn. Because if your people are still pretending this isn't happening, that's a leadership problem, not a technology problem.

Personalization is the retention play, but your data isn't ready

The cost to acquire a new customer has gone up 222%. Acquisition is brutal, and it’s now essential (if it wasn’t already) to have an effective retention system, marketing and generating value from your existing customers.

With retention channels like email, SMS, and push: it's all about value and intentionality. People don't want to get blasted. They want relevant, useful communication from brands they care about.

The personalization opportunity is massive. Lauren's gluten-free example was great: "I would love a world where I don't get shown non-gluten-free products. I'm not going to buy them." Same for her dog: "Don't show me small toys. I only want to see extra large."

But here's the catch. Most brands can't do this because their data is disconnected across systems. They can't map the customer journey because their CRM doesn't talk to their POS doesn't talk to their email platform.

Her advice: get brilliant at the basics first. Get your data connected. Get your taxonomy clean. Because AI will amplify whatever you already have. If your data is messy, AI just makes the mess bigger, faster.

The thread through all of this: the brands that win are the ones doing the boring work right now.

Clean data, crawlable sites, intentional communication, AI-literate teams. None of it is glamorous. All of it compounds.

Optimizing your brand for AI search is essential. It’s clear by now that it’s not going away, it’s not a flash in the pan.

But the fundamentals of selling remain largely the same.

You can catch the full episode on YouTube or Spotify. Wherever you watch or listen, be sure to like, comment, share if you found it useful.

I’ll back later this week with more to help you grow & scale your brand the right way.

— Pietro

PS - Want to see what your store would look like as a mobile app? Get a free preview here, or shoot me a DM on LinkedIn.